Websites are key to performing well in the digital world. They enable businesses the opportunity to widen their base and reach to a bigger marketplace. So, you should try to have only a quality and feature-rich website developed to boost the online performance of the business. These type of websites however are only created by experts as they are aware about the latest trends and technologies in the web world. More so, they enrich websites or web-based applications with all the latest features and functionalities to help them maximize their performance and drive sales and revenue numbers with ease.

It’s therefore important to look to get only top-quality website so that all the targets of the business are realized with ease. The site should be developed keeping visitors and their ease of use in mind. It should be easy to read, the content should be readable and well-formatted and the visual theme should be pleasing yet easy on eyes. Further, users to the site should find it easy to navigate and this is only possible when links and icons related to navigations are clearly visible and well laid-out. Likewise, the site should deliver consistency on all resolutions, be it laptop, mobile or tablet.

Further, the site should be responsive and mobile friendly in nature so that it can cater mobile segment with ease and enables its information to be fed by users across devices and resolutions. It should also take care about delivering better user experience through quick loading of the site. This task is also achieved by taking away any dead link on the site together with assigning a 301 status to any redirect. There should be a contact form as well so that visitors can fill it and contact webmasters or owners in a hassle-free manner. This is how leads are boosted for the business.

In addition, a good website for the business is one that is browser-compatible so that users don’t face any issue in accessing it regardless of the browser type they use. And if the site is not search engine friendly, then it won’t be able to appear on top in search engines thereby denting its visibility and prospects. There has to be a search form in the site so that visitors needn’t face hassles of finding info when they could do it easily. The same purpose is served by an HTML sitemap as this is how visitors can see the site in a single view.

More so, your website should understand the ever-growing utility of responsive design and implement its virtues to widen its net of reach. FAQs should be an integral part of the website to inform and guide visitors alongside removing some of their doubts. What’s more, the home page should not look cluttered and the colours used in the site should be in sync with the nature of the business. In overall, you need a lot of features in the site to boost its performance and that’s why, you should hire only a top website development company for the task.

Cheap web hosts can actually do quite a lot for those of us who know how to use their services to the fullest. Now when I say “cheap”, I don’t mean anything poorly set up. I’m talking about inexpensive, yet valuable – know what I mean? The fact is that many cheap web hosts online provide excellent service, and their account packages each allow for our creativity in web designing according to each of our individual needs.

For a good example of what I’m talking about here, let’s assume you need to create a presence on the web for a business you might have in the real world, in order to spread the word and increase your client base, or just to offer information about your whereabouts, what you do, etc. – using the services of any of the cheap web hosts out there, you could do this with a simple, single-paged website, a domain name and maybe an e-mail account as well. For this, you could easily find an account costing around $5 per month. That’s pretty darned cheap, right?

Or it could be that your needs are not so uncomplicated, but cheap web hosts can still supply you with an account to have your needs met. Let’s say that you run a web log (or “blog”) which showcases the business you run, offers tips or tutorials on the subject of your hobbies you might like to share, or even to create a world-wide discussion on some areas that you are expert in. performing this activity would eventually accumulate a large group of readers, loyal fans, fellow bloggers and others. You could still use the cheap accounts that web hosts can provide.

Imagine that you did all of this as a means of generating income. You could monetize your blog through the use of relevant, contextual ad placement within your posts. This would create the need for more storage
space for posts, bandwidth to accommodate increasing numbers of visitors and perhaps sub-domains for branching off of your main domain name for each post. You could easily find the right account to use for this that cheap web hosts offer, for around ten to fifteen bucks per month to do all of this – perhaps less.

As a further example, let’s say that you need to do your web hosting on a much larger scale – cheap web hosts can still provide you with service. Maybe you’re someone who generates your income solely online. You’d certainly require more bandwidth and storage space, as well as other things. Maybe you’re a publisher of a newsletter that you distribute through e-mail to a vast subscriber base. Maybe you offer products for online sale which people could buy and download from your web pages. Maybe you operate an array of monetized blogs which review other people’s products for affiliate commissions.

Okay, so maybe you do all of the above. Can the use of cheap web hosts really still be a feasible option here? With the use of a reseller account, cheap web hosts can still handle this, and surprisingly, even much, much more – seriously. You see, the concept of reseller accounts was originally put together so that anyone who wished to join in on web hosting business, offering services to others, could do so and enjoy a stable monthly income… but now, reseller accounts aren’t used for just this type of reason anymore. You can actually use a reseller account, which many cheap web hosts offer, to host an unheard of amount of websites, affiliate promotion sites, monetized blogs, forums, discussion boards on various topics, and stake your claim on a huge chunk of the internet all for your own use.

Paying for a reseller account would only cost around twenty to thirty dollars per month, and it would permit you to create and host more websites, domains, and download pages than you can shake a stick at. If you think about it for a bit, at the price of the account, all of your websites that you can host on a reseller account could effectually be less than one cent each month in cost, per website – could cheap web hosts be any more inexpensive?

We are by-and-large, Mac users but most of these tools are cross platform and available on Windows and Linux with the exception of CSSEdit.

Netbeans. This is a fantastic IDE and when used with Xdebug it provides a superb PHP development environment with line-by-line debugging and all that the competition (Zend Studio) offers but it’s free!. BTW we are fans of Zend Studio just not the price tag!

This brings us onto Xdebug. This is a great php module/addon that when used with Netbeans provided great debugging facilities.

CVSDude. What’s that dude? CVSDude.com! this is a really great SVN hosting solution. We tried running our own SVN we tried other SVN providers and finally started using CVSDude for our Subversion Requirements. Most developers will know how important SVN is for team collaboration and without SVN it’s pretty much impossible to collaborate with a team working on a large project. CVSDude offer a cost effective SVN project hosting solution with many extras such as integrated Trac and Bugzilla. Support is great and it can all be managed via their web-based console.

SyncroSVNClient So this brings us onto Subversion clients, there’s allot out there but our favorite is SyncroSVNClient, easy to use, cost effective and reliable.

Safari and Web Inspector . We have experience of Firefox and Firebug and these are excellent tools but if you are a JS developer and have a Mac take a look at Safari’s JS debugger. On our Macs we found it took much less memory resources than Firebug and offers syntax highlighting in the JS code than makes it easier to ready and instantly see bugs in the code. While Firefox and Firebug do a great job Safari and Web Inspector do a top notch job at JS debugging. To enable the Safari Develop menu and Web Inspector, just close Safari and type (or copy/paste) the following command into Terminal.app (/Applications/Utilities): defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool true.

CSSEdit . Unfortunately only available on the Mac CSSEdit is a top notch CSS tool. Firebug for Firefox and Safari Web Inspector do a great job of CSS debugging class inspection and style over-riding so they are great for finding a CSS issue. However a tool we have found priceless on many occasions is CSSEdit by MacRabbit. This CSS editor allows you to browse any styles and override these much the same as FB and Web Inspector but with much more ease. The controls and interface are easy to use. New style attributes can be easily defined by using the GUI without the need to remember the syntax or have to go off hunting for a sample on Google. More information can be found here: http://macrabbit.com/cssedit/.

We hope this information helps!

There are many development tools out there and it’s never a case of one tool does all but our collection of tools certainly seem to be pretty definitive for building a large web-based application.